i7 Marketing Blog

Business intelligence can be the difference between being an average-performing company and a superior-performing organization. Your company can gain a competitive advantage by using business intelligence to align your strategic objectives with line-of-business initiatives, according to a report by UBM Tech in 2008. These initiatives begin with customer and competitor intelligence.

Pricing of your product or service is one of the most vital decisions you can make in your business. Yet, if your company is like many, you may decide on the price based on judgment without objectively assessing how customers value the different components of your offering. As a result, you may undervalue the products and services you sell and not capture the inherent profits you can earn.

A big challenge your company may have is to decide how to market your products and services to other organizations. Following what your competitors are doing can lead you down the wrong path. What matters most is not what is popular, but what will yield the best sales results.

A winning marketing plan can help you meet or surpass your sales objectives. It can turn prospects who otherwise would not buy your products and services into loyal customers. There are six essential steps to develop a winning marketing campaign:

There are two ways you can go about your marketing. You can passively attract customers to you, or you can aggressively pursue customers.

Inbound marketing enables your company to get attention from your audience organically without disrupting their activity. Outbound marketing gets your audience to pay attention to your products and services by disrupting their activity. Consider some of the advantages and differences between inbound and outbound marketing:

Globalization remains the world’s ray of light amid today’s economic environment of high fiscal deficits, high debt and high unemployment. As the world economy slowly emerges from one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, your company can sustain its growth by globalizing your products.

Michael Porter of Harvard Business School revolutionized how business leaders think about competitive strategy with his publications starting in the 1980s. This included the classic books, 

Internet marketers often use the terms SEO and SEM when discussing ways to develop web presence.

Both of these strategies can help you achieve your goal of attracting more visitors to your website. Yet, they are in fact different and distinct services.

To maximize your marketing ROI, it’s vital for you to apply both SEO and SEM strategies.

First, it will help to know the difference between SEO and SEM.

The Internet is the first place your prospects go to search for solutions to their problems, including products or services. That’s why it’s vital for you to have an online presence. Otherwise, they’ll go to your competitors and you’ll lose a sale.

Business intelligence, sometimes called market intelligence, is information that your company can use to develop new customers, increase sales and sustain a competitive advantage. This information provides your company with a view of the market. It helps you understand what is happening in the market, what customers and competitors are doing, and the likely potential for new products or services.